Xerox prints pink slips for 15% of workforce 2024 isn't starting off that well for Xerox: first it said it suffered an IT security breach, and now it's laying off 15 percent of staff. Xerox confirmed to The Register that its planned workforce reduction will take place sometime in the first quarter of 2024. As for specifics, the US corporation only told us cuts would come …
... was back when its photocopier patents were still in effect and still a source of fat profits. That allowed it to sponsor PARC, from which so many clever ideas (like the GUI) came.
Similarly, back when AT&T was a phone company monopoly, it could sponsor Bell Labs, from which so many clever ideas (like information theory and Unix) came.
Is there a pattern here? That important ideas can only come from basic research being conducted with no thought of short-term profit?
Well, an American publicly traded company can't really look beyond next-quarter results... they must maximize investor returns. This is actually a legal requirement.
All they can think of is short-term profit. Or they get sued, or attacked by activist shareholders.
So things like treating employees right and basic R&D go out the window.
In the 80s my company used to send us on a week-long management course. The only memorable part of it was that we were divided into small teams to spend an hour a day running a company based on a computer simulation. The company was in competition with the other teams' companies and you were presented with stuff by the computer and had to make decisions. We invested everything we had in R&D and we won with a course record.
One of those courses I attended, er in the 1970's...., we invested nothing in research, but reduced costs, staff and prices to maximise production and sales. In the last round, as the unproductive boss I made myself redundant to reduce costs further but then charged astronomic prices for our product: we swept the board as everyone else over-sold and had to buy from us. They went bankrupt and we inadvertently created a monopoly.
I have a feeling that this is how some corporations actually operate, obviously without the self-sacrifice of the bosses.
I worked for Xerox back in the 80s and 90s, first servicing small copiers, then the 9400 series, then moved to the Electronic Printing division, where we looked after the 9700/9790 series and beyond. Fun times.
Those laser printers were basically a license to print money. Big mail houses used to print things like phone bills for telcos and much more.
I've occasionally wondered since I left how "The Document Company" was fairing.
I guess I know now.
I did some PostScript programming work, back in my early freelance days, for my former employer. They had 12,000 student enrolment forms to send out before each academic year, each one to be preprinted with individual personal details, initial course selections etc. They ran some COBOL program at central Data Processing that output the details from a database, a hundred or so fields per record. It was possible to configure the print queue to preload a PostScript prelude (which I wrote), which could then take over and read the rest of the data stream and format it nicely on the page (A3, double-sided).
The Xerox machine that did the printing filled most of a room. There was a Sun workstation running the Adobe PostScript interpreter and feeding rendered page images to the actual Xerox system (the name “DocuPrint” comes to mind), which had its own print job management. It could also do collation, binding etc if necessary. A wonder to behold.
My favorite Xerox story, while on a ten week placement with them following my HNC & shadowing a (Field) engineer on those 9700/4135 series machines.....wibbly wobbly......wibbly wobbly...
New engineer, ink on his degree still wet, went to work for Xerox based out of Swindon in a tower block floor above what was once called Debenhams, with Sun Alliance running these printers for mail marketing, he had done the training, shadowed a Engineer & now it was the first time alone in the office on nights.
3am the BAT phone rings.... printer dead on the 9th floor, our hero bounds up the stairs to assess the situation, he follows many basic troubleshooting tests, but has to admit defeat, so he calls in his manager as its now 3.30am.
A few mild expletives later, situation explained, the engineer is directed to verify if there is any power actually reaching the printer, to whit the answer is "No"
Then its not your F...... some stronger expletives followed problem then is it, & come & see me before you go off shift at 8am tomorrow & we will refresh your memory on the fault finding techniques starting with the (More expletives) obvious.
Not a fun ten week placement.....most of it spent leaving at 6am to get on a slow running train for Avonmouth from Swindon, getting home at 8.30pm some nights depending on where the field calls took us.
So many buzz words and sound bites, just be honest and say we need to improve profits and cut costs, with wages being a big cost we can cut and those left will have to work harder to cover the loss of people power. Companies must think their employees are stupid when they come out with this crap, here's a thought, how about cutting the wages of the top % in the company and asking shareholders to accept no pay-outs for 10 years to help the company survive, restructure and grow?
《Rank Stupidity. Insert picture of Kenneth Williams here》
Penny dropped: J Arthur Rank ... Rank Xerox ... "Carry on up the Khyber" whence the image.
For Kenneth Williams with the usual suspects Carry on up the Khyber and nice work if you can get it.
Another great american corporation joining HP and many others disappearing up mismanagement's Khyber Pass.
They don't make films like that any more (not quite to the tastes of our contemporary wokery I shouldn't wonder.) Lord [e]fFing (James), Citoyens Camembert(Williams) et Bidet - probably only "'Allo, 'allo!" did more for anglo-french relations. :)
I know its the silly season but I parsed the above sub as HR components (personnel) being user replaceable modules :)
A HR AI ChatThingy in a print cartridge sized plug-in component is probably do-able now. :( Only requires a small upgrade to the manglement module. The dead or otherwise defective modules can offloaded in the C-suite :)
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